parallel_thinking epitome of incomprehensibility ...is what makes me find titles like "The Princess Diaries" and "The Satanic Verses" so similar. Template: "the" + personifying description + kind of writing, in plural That generates, for instance, The Concubine Cookbooks The Nanny Hagiographies The Presidential Shopping Lists The Ghostly Annotations The Senatorial Novellas The Angelic Tweets The Middle Management Epics ...et cetera! 131119 ... e_o_i "A Complicated Kindness" "A Separate Peace" "a" + adjective + abstract noun (specifically, a good quality) A Deliberate Happiness A Dangerous Love A Delicate Appreciation A Perpendicular Virtue A Knotted Generosity A Pensive Compassion (An easy template, though a bit abstract for me. Personally these are not my favourite titles, though I really like the two books above. But I bet there are many other real titles in this format, and I bet a lot of them are literary fiction or romance. I bet a hundred imaginary dollars! This reminds me of an exercise I did using Python - something I know only a tiny bit - but I can't think how you'd tell Python what an abstract noun is, for instance.) 131120 ... e_o_i The grammar's variable, but if you take fruit + something technological, you'll find a company and book/movie and music! Two musics! Apple Computer A Clockwork Orange The Strawberry Alarm Clock The Electric Prunes Explanation of sorts: If you go to the page a_file_named_xanadax, something I found when I was searching through old files, you'll find that the dialogue starts in the middle of a conversation. It's slightly based on life; the question was "Can you compare Apple Computer and A Clockwork Orange?" which is evidently one of those important life questions, like whether mixing metaphors is really as easy as falling off a piece of cake. Anyway, I added a couple of imaginary people and remixed the conversation into modified Franglais (French-English) with the odd Latin or Italian word and weird spelling. "Ki" = "Je" = "I" for instance... Hi Noam Chomsky! I love you! Colorless green ideas sleep furiously! Yes, I know I'm not Anthony Burgess, never mind James Joyce or Gertrude Stein. But anyway... That's what I did when I was seventeen instead of smoking and drinking and coding million-dollar apps. Well, okay, there was a little bit of drinking. But actually only a little. No idea where the drug references in the last poem come from. As for music! There's a song I like by The Electric Prunes called "I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night." I first heard it about eight years ago, in a CD called "Psychedelic Pop: 12 Spaced-Out 60's Classics" that I bought along with Handel's Water Music. They were having a 2 for $10 sale. Here is a YouTube of it - I like the TV announcer in the beginning - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo14-g0wnOM 131121 ... e_o_i (Should be "60s" not "60's," but in my defense the CD cover makes the same mistake. Just because you're as high as an electric bicycle kite doesn't mean you can throw around apostrophes like confetti, you know!) 131121 ... e_o_i Movie blockbuster mix: holiday + worldwide distaster. Example: Independence Day. My idea: Christmas + nuclear war. (Radioactivity will explain Rudolph's glowing nose, etc.) 131211 ... e_o_i south_africa_and_wood_ducks bloomsday_in_daisyworld 140209 ... e_o_i Bloomsday_in_Daisyworld: holiday + "in" + (real or virtual) place Pi Day in Discworld Valentine's Day in Tralfamadore Christmas in Nairobi ...This past winter solstice thingy I was singing "It's Christmas in Nairobi, with all of the folks at home..." The real song is "Christmas in Killarney" and it's cheesy, bouncy Celtic fun. Spell check tells me to change Killarney to blarney. Ha. Bad_puns_in_fake_Kenya tonight! But do they KNOW it's Christmas? That's the question. "They" should know it's Christmas even when it isn't Christmas. And that's how the so-called West relates to Africa. 150123 ... e_o_i Kirsten/e_o_i in 2013: "My idea: Christmas + nuclear war." Weird Al in 1986: releases "Christmas at Ground Zero." 200128 what's it to you? who go blather from